hockley91

I've got a Dell Inspiron 5150 Laptop that I bought in late summer 2003. It's P4 - 3 Ghz with 512 RAM and has a Nvidia GeForce FXGo5200 with 64 MB RAM.

It's been a great machine....until a few days ago. All of a sudden when I play back my animations after about a minute or so, there are sudden pauses in the animation....like every 10 seconds there's a small pause and then it continues to play and then another pause. It ends up becoming a bit choppy.

Kind of embarrasing to show clients my animations with this nice looking laptop and then it doesn't even play smoothly.....

I've cleaned up my hard drive, increased the virtual memory size and I've removed items from Windows startup to free up some RAM. To no avail. It's still choppy.

Any ideas on what may be happening here?

Bugga_Guy

defraging your computer may help, I usually do twice or so a month.

hockley91

I started to defrag.....thanks!

I forget to do that step. I never defragged this machine so hopefully it helps!

hockley91

Ahhhhhhh.....it didn't work!

I did need to defrag though.....

As I'm running my animations I have the "Windows Task Manager" on and the "CPU Usage" spikes at 100% when the glitches occur. When it's playing smoothly the CPU usage is stable around %58-%68.

I could really use some other ideas here.....

Bugga_Guy

maybe you have a virus... Hit control alt del. click on the mem Usage, it should list and prioritize what is taking the most memory. See what is taking a majority of the memory and click the end process button. keep on doing that and goback and try playing your animation. If all of a sudden your computer is runner faster after ending a process of a certian program - you then know what is causing it. But don't end explorer - it will freeze your computer.

I also know that Norton Anti virus is known to be a pain in the ass. If you have that disconnect from the internet disable anti virus. See if that is a problem.

hockley91

I don't have any viruses.....thank goodness, although I was suspecting I might. I routinely remove spyware as well. I had not defragged though which I am glad I did the other day.

I believe I fixed the problem though, or at least alleviated it. My animations run smoothly again....so far.

I uninstalled the video card driver from the control panel and then I removed the Nvidia software from "remove programs" in control panel. I then went to DELL and downloaded an earlier driver from when I had bought the laptop.

I was thinking back as to what might have happened and I remember that I upgraded Windows Media Player 9 to 10 and I updated the video drivers for my graphics card.

I went to some other forums and it was suggested to roll back to an earlier driver.

I did that last night and it appears to have worked.

I opened Task Manager and looked at the CPU usage again. It appear that the levels have dropped significantly. Now it stays around 40-58% and it does go higher later to around 80% and even 95% at some spikes. However, this is much much better than the other day....

DennisHolland

Hi,

I had the same problems, not only with animations but with all heavier calculations on my Dell 5150. I found a tool, which is not that unknown, but it works fine. It speeds up your Dell pretty good.

By the way, I'm running a Dell Inspiron 9100 laptop (P4-dual, 2Gb, 3.4Gz, Radeon 256Mb) and it's steady as a rock.

Try Dustbuster XP I've installed it in my new Dell immediately after purchase, running it twice a week. It erases 100's of Mb's the first time, but I never had any trouble again.

Enjoy, Dennis de Priester

hockley91

Thanks Dennis! I'm going to try that!

Sounds like you newer laptop is working pretty good. I should have spent the $$ to upgrade the video card when I bought it.....oh well!

Adam

DennisHolland

Hi Adam,

yes, the new Dell Inspiron 9100 is running very smoothly. As a matter a fact, I've ordered VGI with it (didn't know what it was:-) but thank god it's a tool to have my second flatpanel (Dell 2001FP-20") connected as a dual-screen.

So, did you give the Dustbuster XP a try? If yes, it sure must have erased 100's of MB's the first time, but if all dusty files are gone, it should run like new again, even faster! The only point is that you don't have any control of what you're deleting, which is an quite an adventure....

Okay, good luck.

Dennis

hockley91

I did try dustbuster! Thanks! It did clear up some memory. My laptop seems to be running pretty well right now. I think I fixed some hiccups in it's system.

The amount of time I've spent on it, I could have backed up everything and reformatted the drive and cleaned the entire system out!

Anyway, I'm thinking of upgrading the videocard or getting some more RAM for my system. It's got 512 right now, but I'm thinking of getting up to a 1 gig.....I don't know.....